Tuesday, 16 June 2015

The Optic Nerve : Seeing James Joyce Seeing

A
paper written by Philip Harvey for the Bloomsday in Melbourne seminar held on
the feast day, 16th June 2015. Read at Library at the Dock,
Docklands, Melbourne with Philip reading the Harvey bits and Liam Gillespie
reading the Joyce bits (marked thus >>).

The
Optic Nerve 1: 1914-1922 (Ulysses)

James
Joyce was near-sighted. He suffered eye problems from early childhood. Most
photographs and portraits of Joyce have him wearing glasses. Richard Ellmann
says that nearsightedness became part of his personality, for rather than
staring or putting on glasses, he assumed a look of indifference. James Joyce
had strong prescription glasses all his life.

>>
Had he performed any special corporal work of mercy for her?

He
had sometimes propelled her on warm summer evenings, an infirm widow of
independent, if limited means, in her convalescent bathchair with slow
revolutions of its wheels as far as the corner of the North Circular road
opposite Mr Gavin Low’s place of business where she had remained for a certain
time scanning through his onelensed binocular fieldglasses unrecognisable
citizens on tramcars, roadster bicycles, equipped with inflated pneumatic
tyres, hackney carriages, tandems, private and hired landaus, dogcarts,
ponytraps and brakes passing from the city to Phoenix Park and vice versa.

Joyce
spent much of his life “scanning though his onelensed binocular fieldglasses”.
When we read Ulysses an observable majority of visual descriptions are
close-ups. Long distance is often a blur and with landscapes Joyce turns to
parody and other literary forms, more often than not, rather than trust his own
powers of observation.

>>
Why could he then support that his vigil with the greater equanimity?

Because
in middle youth he had often sat observing through a rondel of bossed glass of
a multi-coloured pane the spectacle offered with continual changes of the
thoroughfare without, pedestrians, quadrupeds, velocipedes, vehicles, passing
slowly, quickly, evenly, round and round and round the rim of a round
precipitous globe.

In
Trieste James Joyce suffered intense attacks of inflammation of the iris.
Sometimes he had to rest his eyes for a month, the attacks were so bad.

>>
Houses of decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry you had an
uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of them, Stephen.
Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh’s library where you read
the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom? The hundredheaded rabble of
the cathedral close. A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness,
his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled.

Attacks
of glaucoma and synechia threatened blindness if not attended to. Blindness,
the fear of going blind or imagining oneself blind, hover at the edges of many
jokes and passages in Joyce’s writing. “Shut your eyes and see.”

Ulysses
is a supreme act of memory of anything in Dublin Joyce saw and remembered. It
is a sustained work of visual memory, written at some distance from the
locations it so lovingly describes, perfected in time by right placement of the
right words.

>>
Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway
reluctant arms, hissing up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and
upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night: lifted, flooded and
let fall.

Ulysses
is from the opening line a creative testimony to how the eye sees the world.
Stately plump Buck Mulligan is not just a signal of the rampant comedy to
follow, it is a description that causes us to see the character instantly, due
to the incongruous juxtaposition of the word ‘stately’ with the not very
stately epithet ‘plump’. The whole book brims with visuals, almost invariably
in surprising forms.

Ulysses
is especially notable for close-ups, the sort of appearances a near-sighted man
would see, whether in the immediate here and now of Trieste where the book is
being written, or in endless memories of Dublin, recalled at will and with
extraordinary verbal accuracy.

>>
The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table,
mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable … Mr Bloom watched curiously,
kindly, the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the
white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes.

Ulysses
is run through with visual descriptions of the world and of the people in the
world. We know that Joyce uses Ulysses as a celebration of all the senses and
this includes the most immediate and powerful of the five senses: sight.

>>
What a time you were, she said.

She
set the brasses jingling as she raised herself briskly, an elbow on the pillow.
He looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft bubs, sloping
within her nightdress like a shegoat’s udder. The warmth of her couched body
rose on the air, mingling with the fragrance of the tea she poured.

A
strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow.

Stephen
Dedalus’s morning walk down Sandymount Strand is Joyce’s main deliberate and
overt description of the experience of perception.

>>
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through
my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the
nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.
Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them
bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure.
Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno.
Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five
fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

This
is a rehearsal of St Thomas Aquinas’ theory of vision, which Joyce would have
learnt from the Jesuits at school.

>> Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush
crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a
stride at a time … Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished
since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I
can see. See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world
without end.

Ulysses
is a huge casebook of the psychology of perception, “thought through my eyes”.
Joyce’s pet theory of epiphanies goes exponential as he cunningly arranges
words to make us see the everyday objective reality of the city, so that it
becomes a main character.

But
epiphany is only one method of revelation of the visual.

The
stylistic variations that constitute Ulysses cause the creation of many more
kinds of visual effect in words than are found elsewhere in a work of fiction.
The opening of the Sirens episode at the Ormond Hotel on the River Liffey is an
extensive soundscape of aural and visual effects, a beautiful cacophony that
draws us siren-like into the interior drama to follow. It is a picture poem,
one of the great poems of modernism.

>>
Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.

Imperthnthn
thnththn.

Chips,
picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.

Horrid!
And gold flushed more.

A
husky fifenote blew.

Blew.
Blue Bloom is on the

Gold
pinnacled hair.

A
jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castile …

A
sail! A veil awave upon the waves.

Lost.
Throstle fluted. All is lost now.

Horn.
Hawhorn.

When
first he saw. Alas!

Full
tup. Full throb …

The
spiked and winding cold seahorn. Have you the?

Each
and for other plash and silent roar.

Pearls:
when she. Liszt’s rhapodies. Hissss.

You
don’t?

Did
not: no, no : believe Lidlyd. With a cock with a carra.

Black.

While
all of this visual description helps toward the verbal recreation of one day in
Dublin, it serves other purposes as well. It serves to confirm the shared sense
of the universe. It creates the sense of a complete physical world in which the
action, what there is of it, takes place. It operates mimetically to affirm the
reality of the world as being looked upon.

>>What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to
the height of a yard from the fire towards the opposite wall?

Under
a row of five coiled spring housebells a curvilinear rope, stretched between
two holdfasts athwart across the recess beside the chimney pier, from which
hung four smallsized square handkerchiefs folded unattached consecutively in
adjacent rectangles and one pair of ladies’ grey hose with lisle suspender tops
and feet in their habitual position clamped by three erect wooden pegs two at
their outer extremities and the third at their point of junction.

Joyce
presents his visuals without comment, hanging there as it were, or erect as it
were, leaving the reader to see anew.

>>
What did Bloom see on the range?

On
the right (smaller) hob a blue enamelled saucepan : on the left (larger) hob a
black iron kettle.

And
revelation through the visual, “thought through my eyes”, raises our sense of
the states of the characters. By the time we reach Molly Bloom’s monologue we
have experienced many different kinds of visuals, and Molly herself is not
backward in coming forward.

>>
I love to see a regiment pass in review the first time I saw the Spanish
cavalry at La Roque it was lovely after looking across the bay from Algeciras
all the lights of the rock like fireflies or those sham battles on the 15 acres
the Black Watch with their kilts in time at the march past the 10th
hussars the prince of Wales own or the lancers O the lancers theyre grand

Molly’s
monologue is a sustained exercise in memory, reliant for its impact on
countless visual cues.

James
Joyce endured pain from his eyes his whole life, but half way through the
composition of Ulysses, in Switzerland in 1917, he suffered an attack of
glaucoma so serious that his ophthalmologist decided to operate. The doctor
performed an iridectomy on Joyce’s right eye. Richard Ellmann says: “As so
often happens, the exudation from the eye flowed over into the incision and
reduced the vision permanently.”

Years
later Joyce would joke that a person can see as well with one eye as two, but
the reality of being half-blind affects him for the rest of his life. Eye
operations of different kinds become common. He would argue with friends about
how many operation he had had, no doubt making a point.

The
Optic Nerve 2: 1922-1941 (Finnegans Wake)

In
1922 Joyce was confronted with a challenge: what to do next?

What
does he write to follow something as vast, new, and different as Ulysses?

>>
It would have diverted, if ever seen, the shuddersome spectacle of this
semidemented zany amid the inspissated grime of his glaucous den making believe
to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles, editions de ténèbres …

Ulysses
and FW are alike in their uniqueness, unalike in their literary intentions.

The
two novels are similar in their scale of ambition, dissimilar in palpable
verbal appearance.

Ulysses
is an extended conversation. FW is expression at cross-purposes.

Ulysses
would wish to escape the book. FW has its face pressed close to the page.

Ulysses
is a narrative storybook about the physical place Dublin and the intimate lives
of a handful of its citizens. FW is a non-narrative book, where Dublin is locus
for an allegory about all human experience and history.

Ulysses
is an extended exercise in cross-reference. FW tests our bearings on every
page.

Ulysses
goes outward. FW dwells inward.

Ulysses
is written by someone opening his eyes to everything in existence. FW is
written by someone who is going blind.

Ulysses
is a new Odyssey written by another blind Homer. FW is a new Paradise Lost,
written by another blind John Milton.

The
novel he writes for the next seventeen years is again set in Dublin.

>>
What Irish capitol city (a dea o dea!) of two syllables and six letters, with a
deltic origin and a nuinous end, (ah dust oh dust!) can boost of having a) the
most extensive public park in the world, b) the most expensive brewing industry
in the world, c) the most expansive peopling thoroughfare in the world, d) the
most phillohippuc theobibbous paupualtion in the world: and harmonise your
abecededd responses?

Answer
Dublin, though the landmarks of the city are not easily recognisable nor named
as directly as in Ulysses. One landmark described in some detail is the Book of
Kells.

>>
Starting with old Matthew himself, as he with great distinction said then just
as since then people speaking have fallen into the custom, when speaking to a
person, of saying two is company when the third person is the person darkly
spoken of, and then that last labiolingual basium might be read as a suavium
if whoever the embracer then was wrote with a tongue in his (or perhaps her)
cheek as the case may have been then; and the fatal droopadwindle slope of the
blamed scrawl, a sure sign of imperfectible moral blindness; the toomuchness,
the fartoomanyness of all those fourlegged ems: and why spell dear god with a
big thick dhee (why, O why, O why?)

These
passages tell us a lot about the visual world of the author. He is fixed on
words, his eyes are close up to the words, he lives inside them, they in him.
He lives in the world of the page. This is not surprising when we consider that
FW was written using only one eye, usually inside with sunlight and lamplights,
in small apartments, bookshops and libraries. He wore a white jacket while
writing, better to reflect light onto the written page. And what he does in FW
is transform words. They transmute, compound, elongate. There are puns and
inventions and linkages. And we are made to look at these visual things in
order to decipher them and see their meanings. All words become objects to
re-organise into new shapes and appearances. Joyce plays around with letters,
makes endless pun with many languages, turns words and letters into actual
characters in the story. Joyce makes us look at words.

>>
Wipe your glosses with what you know.

They
are themselves characters with a life of their own, certain to grow and change,
put on appearances, act out roles. And their visual shapes, not just their
singular musical sounds, are a matter for constant creative play. Joyce’s daily
business of writing, that ancient human art, is tested and questioned, is
visualised into life and even put back to bed.

>>
The use of the homeborn shillelagh as an aid to calligraphy shows a distinct
advance from savagery to barbarism. It is seriously believed by some that the
intention may have been geodetic, or, in the view of the cannier, domestic
economical. But by writing thithaways end to end and turning, turning and end
to end hithaways writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of
latters slettering down, the old semetomy place and jupetbackagain from tham
Let Rise till Hum Lit. Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?

Joyce
extends this, takes the visual inventions of the modern and turns them into
modes of expression, be they newspapers, telephones, recordings. He takes the
essentials of that most popular form of twenties entertainment, the silent
cinema, and utilises them for his own ends.

>>
The movibles are scrawling in motions, marching, all of them ago, in pitpat and
zingzang for every busy eerie whig’s a bit of a torytale to tell.

FW
is packed with slapstick Keystone Kops smash-up language. The hundred letter
thunder words that punctuate FW remind us of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin
falling down a staircase.

Chaplin
himself is mentioned several times, if you are watching closely.

>>
Now there can be no question about it either that I having done as much, have
quite got the size of that demilitery young female (we will continue to call
her Marge) whose types may be met with in any public garden, wearing a very
“dressy” affair, known as an “ethel” of instep length … when she is not sitting
on all the free benches avidously reading about “it” but ovidently on the look
out for “him” … or at the movies swallowing sobs and blowing bixed mixcuits
over “childe” chaplain’s “latest”.

“It’
in that passage a reminder of The It Girl, Clara Bow. The book’s characters are
archetypes, typical of those in silent movies. And Joyce borrows the essential
key to silent movie acting – mime – in several sequences of FW, including The
Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Naggies.

>>
Time: the pressant. With futurist one-horse balletbattle pictures and the
Pageant of Past History worked up with animal variations amid everglaning
mangrovemazes and beorbtracktors by Messrs. Thud and Blunder. Shadows by the
film folk, masses by the good people. Promptings by Elanio Vitale. Longshots,
upcloses, outblacks and stagetolets by Hexenschuss, Coachmaher, Incubone and
Rocknarrag … Jests, jokes, jigs and jorums for the Wake lent from the
properties of the late cemented Mr. T. M. Finnegan, R.I.C. … Accidental music
providentially arranged by L’Archet and Lacorde. Meliodiotiosities in
purefusion by the score.

FW
is Joyce’s book of the night, just as Ulysses was his book of the day. It is a
dreambook, and dreams are when our eyes are closed and then see. James Joyce
needed sleep a lot, in his state of half-blindness and mental stress.

>>
But, vrayedevraye Blankdeblank, god of all machineries and tomestone of
Barnstaple, by mortifisection or vivisuture, splitten up or recompounded, an
isaac jacquemin mauromormo milesian, how accountibus for him, moreblue?

Because
the night is dark, where we do not see things clearly, where things change
appearance, where we see everything in a new way.

>>Oasis,
cedarous esaltarshoming Leafboughnoon!

Oisis,
coolpressus onmountof Sighing! …

Oasis,
phantastical roseway anjerichol! …

Oisis,
plantainous dewstuckacqmirage playtennis!

Although
the pain caused by his eyes must have been unbearable inside his head,
incessantly and repeatedly, Joyce wrote all his life. As he and his family
travelled from one city to another, famous now but still largely reclusive, he
would put his own problems aside by referring to himself as “an international
eyesore.” The particular French white wine he drank most evenings is now
believed to be only secondarily for the purposes of getting tipsy but because
it was the one wine he knew that effectively anaesthetised the eye.

There
is no end to FW, it starts and ends anywhere in the book, but the printed
version handed down to us through the generations ends with the river Anna
Livia Plurabelle returning to the sea.

>>
O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know.
Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back
to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the
near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it moananoaning,
makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.

“The
near sight of the mere size of him.” In conclusion Liam will read a
fascinating family portrait of someone called ‘A Dayfather’. This man works in
the newspaper office’s of the Freeman’s Journal, where Leopold Bloom sees him
sitting setting galleys. This brief picture could be of James Joyce himself, in
Paris writing FW every week, his eyes fixed on making new words out of old
letters.

>>
(Liam, read this very slowly) A DAYFATHERHe [Leopold Bloom] walked on through the
caseroom, passing an old man, bowed, spectacled, aproned. Old Monks, the
dayfather. Queer lot of stuff he must have put through his hands in his time:
obituary notices, pubs’ ads, speeches, divorce suits, found drowned. Nearing
the end of his tether now. Sober serious man with a bit in the savings-bank I’d
say. Wife a good cook and washer. Daughter working the machine in the parlour.
Plain Jane, no damn nonsense.